Chapter 6 An ending

Part A: Hannibal and the Dizzied World

We've had three more sessions, and Joseph has just now left for the last time. He's not coming back and I'm left feeling flat.

It's as though I've unexpectedly found myself at the end of a complex novel, peopled by engrossing characters and a promising plot, to find that there was no real climax, no revelation or resolution. And the simile that has come to mind is in itself revealing as I've again cast myself in the role of observer rather than participant, a reader of other people's stories rather than someone in there grappling with issues that our relationship throws up. This has happened before and I'm guessing that it will happen again. Is this the story I'm stuck in? Is this my moment of 'eternal return', a gate through which I'll never pass?

A more sanguine part of me says that this is just the way things are and it's not such a big deal. People and events come into our lives, things progress in their own unpredictable way for some time, then the people and events pass. That's the nature of things. In this case, Joseph's mother thought that certain puzzling things in Joseph might be addressed through him coming to see me for a while, we've had our while (and it's been rich and enigmatic and perhaps provocative in a way that only the future will reveal), and now it's time to move on.

That, at least, seems to be Joseph's mother's view. She rang me soon after our seventeenth session and said she'd been thinking that perhaps it was time to finish. ‘This kind of thing can go on indefinitely,’ she said to me, ‘and it's quite a drain on the finances. What do you think about winding things up in the next fortnight or so?’

I told her that there was this underlying sense in our work of something clamouring for attention, something insistent but which had as yet eluded our grasp. ‘If we finish now,’ I said, ‘Joseph may be left with the feeling that an elusive something has been left hanging in the air.’

His mother said that she'd talk to Joseph, and later rang me again to say that they'd agreed to a further two sessions. ‘He seems pretty relaxed about finishing, Steve,’ she told me. ‘It doesn't seem to bother him much either way.’

But I felt uneasy. There was something unresolved.

A dream that Joseph brought to our seventeenth session did nothing to reconcile me to what was looming as a premature parting of the ways.

‘There were these six houses,’ he told me, again with a bright smile. ‘Five of the houses have already been burgled, and in the dream I know that the sixth one, the one that I'm in, is about to be burgled as well. But I just can't get the police to come.’

‘You can't get the police to come,’ I said

‘No,’ Joseph chuckled. ‘They just won't come.’

‘I guess that must have been pretty frustrating for you,’ I said, trying to ignore his disarming smile.

‘Well it was pretty odd,'‘ he said. ‘You'd think that police would come if they knew that five houses had already been burgled.’

‘And yet they don't take your concerns seriously,’ I said. ‘It's just like the other dreams.’

‘It is, isn't it!’ said Joseph cheerily. ‘I wonder what it's all about? Is it something in me, or in my family that these dreams are referring to? Is it something at school, or something to do with the state the world is in? It's a mystery. I just can't think what it might be.’

His tone threw me. It was disengaged, a kind of intelligent musing about an interesting problem that had come his way. I felt shut out and again unable to think of a response.

When Joseph arrived this morning he told me he had a solution to our enigma.

‘I've worked it out Steve! It was right under my nose all the time and I didn't see it! During the week I've been asking myself, 'What is it that I'm not taking seriously enough?' and then I realised that it was to do with my health. I've got some kind of allergy to certain foods and for the past few months I've been eating lots of junk food and going to bed late at night. I'm sure that what all these dreams are about is the need to take my health more seriously.’

‘It's all about your health,’ I said, feeling privately unconvinced but trying to stay with the sense of achievement that his buoyed up tone was conveying.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I feel a lot better. It feels so good to have discovered it. I'm eating better now, and trying to get myself to sleep at a decent hour at night, and I'm sure my poor old body is heaving a huge sigh of relief!’

‘So it feels as though the meaning of your dreams has been revealed to you.’

‘Yes,’ Joseph said with his wide smile. ‘I was talking to Mum about this the other night and we think that it's OK now to finish the sessions. It was really good talking to Mum, actually.’

‘So this insight seems to have turned some things around,’ I said. ‘Something has shifted in the way you and your mother talk to each other. And you're now paying attention to your poor old body. Things are looking brighter.’ All the time, I was aware that I was forcing these words out over a sense of disappointment.

‘Well not everything is better,’ he said. ‘Things have been pretty grim at school. We've got these relief teachers at the moment who can't control the class and some of the kids are making the most of it.’

I remembered how, when he first told me of the 'wild' behaviour at his new school, he'd done so as if really enjoying the noise and sense of chaos. But he was experiencing this new development as "grim'

‘Some of the kids can't be controlled,’ I said.

‘Some of them are teasing me quite a lot. But you can't let that kind of thing worry you, cos it only encourages them to do it more.’

‘They're teasing you in a distressing way,’ I said, determined for a moment to keep hold of what I knew was an unacknowledged distress, a terrible pain.

‘No, not really. It doesn't bother me. Can we play Civilisation now? I haven't played it for a while, and I want to get as much done before we finish these sessions. It's such a good game. It's so good!’

Again I was filled with a sense of helplessness and didn't know what to say, how to respond. I look to my mind in moments like this, for answers, for ways out of the confusion, for clever ways forward. It races. Sometimes it comes up with the goods, but when it fails me I give up the struggle and abandon myself to the mystery. Games seem to have helped in the past. I don't know everything. Hell, let the boy play the game, let it go ... hope for the best.

So Joseph and I returned to the game for a final flurry. Things had turned sour in Timeland. His early successes had not been enough to stave off threats from more powerful civilisations abroad, and he spent our final half hour together taking a puzzling and almost manic delight in destroying his own cities, trying to eliminate them before the approaching enemy armies arrived. When I came to do my notes afterwards, I found myself writing about his 'suicidal impulse'.

His mother came in at the end of the session to say thankyou and goodbye. Joseph stood to one side, looking embarrassed.

‘Thankyou Steve,’ she said. ‘It's been very good and I'm sure it's helped Joseph.’ She looked over to Joseph, silently inviting him to add something, but he was smiling awkwardly and looking away.’I've noticed changes in him... and he's made the transition to the new school very smoothly which I'm sure he wouldn't have done without your help.’ Again she looked in vain to Joseph to add something. Now she too was feeling awkward. She thanked me again, I shook hands with them both and then they disappeared down the path for the last time.

‘Hello Giles ... you got my notes?’

‘I did Steve.’

‘I'm feeling very agitated,’ I say, ‘full of chaotic energies... for the past 15 minutes or so I've been pacing up and down the house, partly to try to focus my thoughts before talking to you but also because I can't keep still ... I've got so much going on inside me, so much I'm thinking about, so much I want to say ... Last night I dreamt about a boy in great distress spilling things all over my study floor, a boy who talked endlessly, sometimes saying a lot in a phrase, sometimes going on and on about nothing. It's me, Giles, and I'm worried about the coherence of what I'm about to spill.’

‘You're worried that maybe I won't be able to follow …..or that I won't like the mess.’

‘Or that the torrent of words that are about to come tumbling out won't actually mean anything.’

‘I doubt it Steve ... but we shall see ... spill away! ... this isn't a library or a church, spillages are quite permissible here!’

Already I can feel myself less agitated, less raw, less unformed somehow.

‘This isn't a single spill I've got Giles, I want to spill from several different parts of me. God, Giles, I hope this isn't going to be an impossible outpouring ... but I'm trying to get closer to something.’

‘To get closer to something that makes sense?’

‘Not quite, I don't think. Closer to ... closer to something that's usefully energetic I think ... This flatness I'm feeling about Joseph's departure, this sense of inadequacy ... it doesn't have much energy about it ... I just feel deflated, down ... there's no spring left. But when I allow myself to feel the anger and agitation that's there... and that's connected I think to a kind of humiliation... then I'm not flat any more ... I'm agitated, restless ... there's an energy there that I'm hoping is useful….. yes, that's what I'm wanting to get closer to.’

‘An energy that might be useful,’ says Giles.

‘Yes. I want to start with one of my dreams... well, a couple of dreams actually, but first of all with a dream about humiliation ... And I want you to interrupt me at any time, I'm worried that this is going to be impossible to follow.’

‘Go on Steve. I'll let you know if I'm not with you.’

‘I had this dream the other night that I was being vomited on by a man ... in my dream I stood there with his vomit over my head and face, and my head was bowed and I felt so abject, so defeated, drained of energy, weak and saggy in my shoulders ... I could feel the misery as if it were coursing around my veins, getting right into my bones ... But then ... in the dream ... this abject weakness passed and I suddenly had this sense of release, of being purged, and I knew that this was because I'd allowed myself to feel these desperate feelings. And suddenly I was out the door and meeting up with my wife in this crowded shopping mall, a part of things again, doing things …’

‘This abject weakness is how you felt when Joseph went away.’

‘That's how I felt.’

‘You felt defeated ... humiliated.’

‘And useless. Yes ... drained of energy and saggy in the shoulders. Variations on this theme keep coming up in my dreams at the moment Giles ... Also this week I had a longer dream ... I know this is too much Giles, that I'm telling you too much, that it's unprocessable when I pour things out like this ...’

‘It's all right Steve,’ says Giles. ‘You're speaking about humiliation and impotence, how they feel and how they might be useful.’

‘ ... in this longer dream I am at some kind of a conference trying really hard to hear what the speaker is saying but the man next to me - an aboriginal man with glasses - keeps interrupting, whispering in my ear, wanting to tell me something but also being deliberately annoying. I finally get totally exasperated and throw his glasses over to the other side of the room and the conference breaks up in confusion. Later we are reconciled and I realise that he is being unconsciously impelled to provoke me so as to broaden my perceptions of what exists and what needs to be taken into account, and we sit together for the rest of the talk holding hands. Later we are all taken out and shown the primitive sewage system at the conference centre, and we each have to spend time sweeping partly processed shit down manholes.’

‘You're covered in vomit, you're sweeping raw shit,’ says Giles. ‘You're pissed off, humiliated, furious ... shouting, flinging things, your body filled with terrible humiliations.’

‘It's dreadful, and I experience it as dreadful. I feel dreadful. And I get worked up, angry, agitated... this is what we were talking about the other week, isn't it Giles! ... really feeling this stuff, the bloody awfulness of it, the existence of the horrible, of evil if you like ... it animates ... or has the potential to animate ... to rouse the body to do something!’

‘That's what you seem to be doing in these dreams,’ says Giles. ‘It can have other less vitalising effects too of course.’

‘Yes, that's exactly what's so frustrating! It seems to animate me in my dreams but not in my work. It didn't happen with Joseph! He and I needed to get into the horror of things and somehow get agitated and worked up and energetic ... but it was all so cerebral ... all so careful and intelligent and thinky ... we never got going ...’

‘The awfulness was denied,’ says Giles.

‘By us both,’ I say. ‘We're each of us, Joseph and I, struggling with this business of denying strong feeling, of being divorced from feeling because it's too terrible down there... too terrible for each of us in our own lives and too terrible for both of us together in his ... the bullying, the sadism, the sense of a world being torn apart, of the good being too weak to resist the bad ... The same thing seems to be happening for both of us! Both Joseph and I are struggling with issues to do with violent impulses and terrible humiliations and we both cope by denying their existence. We both manage by telling ourselves and the world that these things don't really bother us, that we don't feel weak, impotent, angry and humiliated. We've each, in our own way, split ourselves off from these bodily-felt pains and impulses and lead a kind of insipid life as a result ….. well, not insipid, I don't think that applies to either of us, but limited, lacking a certain kind of vitality or connection ... we're both prone to depressions, or to a kind of passivity which denies us a sense of being agents in the world... Maybe that's why we're were both so taken with the Civilisation game ... because it gives us this sense of creating the world anew ... Giles, I could stop there and I know there would be lots to talk about, but I want to keep going ...’

‘Keep going Steve, I'm with you.’

‘I'm trying to understand better what's operating inside me, why it is that I go through these cycles of optimistic and bubbly engagement followed by a kind of flatness which gets disguised as romanticism (god is working his magic in the unconscious), or as fatalism (it's all beyond my control or powers of comprehension) ... which always ends up somehow passive, with me as the observer, usually lost and impotent ... feeling useless, unimportant, not a part of things ... It's to do with excluding strong passions, isn't it? ... These supervisions are helping bring this question up into my consciousness, and the failure with Joseph too ... it's like these two things are making me look a bit closer at what's going on in my life, in my personal life, where I see the same kind of patterns, or I've been seeing the same kind of patterns in the last few days, anyway ... I want to talk about this now ... In my personal life I see the same things, the same sense of me being passive, being the observer, then feeling full of despair about the world passing me by, ignoring me ... of there being no obvious place for me in it ... I'm not connecting with it and I find myself wondering why, what it might have been about my own childhood that accounts for this, and for the mad rages, the Hannibal moods, that periodically visit me ... I'm wanting to please, to do the right thing but I don't get the response I'm seeking ... I don't experience the world as responsive to me, and I've been remembering stories I've heard about myself as a baby ...’

‘You're searching for clues in your first months as a baby,’ says Giles.

‘I know that as a baby I was left to cry until the clock's minute hand indicated that it was time for the four-hourly feed. My father used to boast that he had to hold onto my mother's ankles in bed to stop her responding to my cries, and such was the atmosphere in our family ... or in my internalised family, it was probably different for my siblings ... that I never experienced any distress when he told us these stories. We would just laugh. It was just the way things were. Anyway, I've been wondering recently how I learnt to cope with what must have been an awful trauma for me as a baby, and so the other day I asked my sister about what I was like as a little boy, especially in relation to my mother. ‘You were the perfect little boy in her eyes,’ she said. 'It was like everything you did brought pleasure to Mum and Dad. It was just the way you were, their perfect son. It was just the way you were.' ... For the first time in my life I felt very sad when I heard this ... I suddenly knew that as a very little boy I learnt to compensate for my distress ... the crying and hunger that weren't responded to ...’

‘ ... that were impotent.’

‘Yes ... and I responded by finding a different way to be potent ... by becoming the perfect eldest child. I worked out a way of living blissfully with my parents. It involved completely turning off primitive impulses in me, losing fundamental touch with any sense of myself as a sexual or angry or distressed or needy person.’

‘You turned off the healthy passions.’

‘Turned them off, or turned them inwards. And outwardly I constructing a self (what Winnicott would call a 'false self’) that took its cues from the reactions of the people around me ... It took a marriage breakdown, my first analysis, and then the Hannibal dream to open some cracks and give me a glimpse of a less benign underworld .... These recent dreams, Giles, of being an abandoned child in the refugee camp, are bringing back other memories, of being ugly, dirty, repellent ... of desperate letters, literally tear-stained letters, written from boarding school but not being responded to, of soiling my pants as a small boy or getting drunk in my late teens and my mother's disgust ... I know these things happened a long time ago, some of them more than 50 years ago, but I feel them freshly... not the memories, but the feelings, I feel them in my present life …’

‘You're feeling them now, with Joseph gone.’

‘Im feeling flat and I'm also feeling the impulse to deny that I'm feeling dreadful.’

‘These dreams and memories are helping you to feel what you are feeling.’

‘The memories also seemed to be connecting me to some kind of repressed energy, or at least I think that's what this agitation that I'm feeling today is all about.’

‘A frustrated vitality.’

‘I remember a day when I was about nine, I think. My mother had taken us to see a film which had some wonderful music and dancing in it and later on that day while my mother was out (perhaps with my brother and sister) and I had the house to myself, I rearranged all the furniture in the main room so that I could jump from one cushioned chair to the next. Then I put on the soundtrack from the film, turned the gramophone up high, and began to dance, leaping from chair to chair and feeling myself alive and graceful, full of joy and to be almost hovering in the air ... I can feel it all over again, right now as I'm talking to you! ... It felt like magic, like a sublime experience, and when I heard my mother's car pull up outside I couldn't wait for her to see me. But when I looked up, her face was full of thunder. I was messing up the furniture. Perhaps, also, she could see that I was in danger of hurting myself on the hard floors. Whatever the reason, I felt crushed by her disapproval ... I came to know instinctively that while my distress and creative capacity were incapable of getting my mother's attention, she would respond to me when I was uncomplicated, sunny … helpful …'

‘The world responded to your helpful side,’ says Giles.

‘Look I know this isn't the whole story, it isn't balanced and it's certainly not fair ... it leaves out all that my good-enough and much-loved mother gave to me ...’

‘All that other side is there but it's not a part of this story.’

‘That's right. This is about how I came to have a sense of myself which was to do with being reliable, thorough, responsible, intelligent ...’

‘Rather than passionate, Dionysian even,’ says Giles.

‘It was, I suppose, a kind of creation of me that left other things out, a story that got told about the developing Steve which worked in one sense but which was also terribly limiting.’

‘And that has been told many times since, no doubt, by you and by others.’

‘Yes, it's a story that's defined me ... given me a way of being in the world. And this is the role I've been playing in my work with Joseph, playing the elder sibling ... I gather together my resources, work out what to do to help, talk to you diligently and energetically every week ... And then it doesn't work and I'm left feeling depressed and only in touch with the deeper feelings when I'm dreaming... and that leads to this morning's agitation, much of which is a kind of mad rage with myself, psychotherapy, my colleagues, with the way life seems to be ...’

‘The frustrations become rageful,’ says Giles. ‘The rage is an attempt to break through to something.’

‘The rage keeps me from disintegrating completely. When the rage takes possession of me, I have a sense of myself as an agent, as possessing some power, of bringing some raw order to what otherwise would be overwhelming and an experience of not existing. My rage is my crutch, what I hold onto when the false-self structure breaks down ... The rage gives me a sense of agency, a hope that I might be able to make something of the raw mess within, the partly unprocessed sewage. It's the rage that at terrible and mad times in my life spews out all over the place and destroys things. But I'm hoping that it can break through to something else... that Hannibal can stop eating babies and frightening people and can play the piano ... Are you still there Giles?’

‘I'm still here Steve. I'm still with you.’

‘There's more I've got to say ... I should stop there, but there's much more! Earlier in the week I came across the following in a book I was reading: ‘Without a model or holding internal mother, mind enters into states of splitting and disintegration.’ (1) That describes so well what happens to me when, like right now, my 'eldest sibling' efforts to do a good-enough job break down. I've learnt to cope with the world by constructing a model of health and sanity... it's a model built around values such as thoroughness, intelligence, carefulness, honesty, punctuality, growth, order and reason.’

‘And you're now finding that not all of life can be squeezed into such a model,’ says Giles.

‘That's right,’ I say. ‘There are times when the model breaks down and my sense of self with it.’

‘And you're left either feeling useless or possessed by a blind rage.’ says Giles. ‘Hannibal is the raging monster imprisoned inside you.’

‘His influence seeps through cracks.’

‘You're wanting to open up the cracks Steve, to make the channels wider.’

‘It's so stifling in there, so claustrophobic. I sense Hannibal's power, but I also feel the impossibility of him playing the piano unless there's .... unless there's ... I don't know Giles ... unless there's some greater connection to the overworld.’

‘He's cramped in there.’

‘Getting angry helps.’

‘It can give you more room.’

‘Hannibal, in his cell, feels cut-off from the world, despite the seepages, despite the way he exerts this clandestine control ... He looks powerful, but inside he sees life going on out there and he feels apart from it, cut off ... It's the way I feel when I'm at my most distressed ... I feel, at times like this, closer to the 'unthinkable anxiety' which Winnicott says is the experience of the baby who is not held and cared for in a good-enough way by the mother.’

‘You're overstating it of course,’ says Giles. ‘You are not ineffective, you are not a hermit. You're not simply rigidly ordered or chaotically mad.’

‘I know, Giles,’ I say. ‘I know I'm able to orientate myself in some way that is useful, I know that clients feel animated, at times, by the particular kind of attention I bring to my listening.’

‘You're a good elder brother.’

‘Yes, I guess that's part of it. Also, perhaps for my own personal reasons, my own relationship with the compensatory pleasures of disembodied stories, I enjoy fantasy and play in a way that is exciting and developmentally vital. But it's also limited, or limiting ... constricted... too orderly somehow, too careful ... coming too much from my responsible self and without enough gutsy, gusty passion somehow.’

‘It's the gusty passion that you want filling your sails,’ says Giles.

‘My sails feel limp ... I don't feel the presence of any gusty wind.’

‘You feel impotent.’

‘Too limited by being just an elder brother. But I don't want to throw him overboard, I need him too, especially if there's a gutsy, gusty wind around. I want him at the tiller, or on the bridge, or whatever the nautical image is.’

‘You value your ordering mind,’ says Giles. ‘The useless, destructive rages need your ordering mind to prevent disasters.’

‘My mind... it's limiting, but it also manages to keep me sane. My temporarily successful attempts to create order with my thoughts does seem to keep madness at arm's length. It prevents the psychotic from destroying the coherence of my conscious story. But it's also banished the greater part of my feeling life to a psychotic underworld, and I now experience these feelings in eruptions of rage or anxiety which are potent, exciting, uncontrollable and destructive of relationship.’

‘Your mind gives your life coherence though it limits your experience of life,’ says Giles.

‘This is Winnicott's mind-object which we've talked about before, isn't it Giles, where there is a splitting off of the mind from the body, a mind that has taken over the function of the mother. And this mind-object is feeling the pinch, it's feeling itself being undermined by events.’

‘Things are happening in your life, and in the life around you, to loosen its grip,’ says Giles.

‘Yes. In the life around me! That's crucial, isn't it, it makes all the difference! We're not isolated units, operating according to our intrapsychic laws, we're also connected to a world and the world is a source.’

‘There is no such thing as a baby!’

‘If we return to the image of the sailing ship, we have to keep remembering that the ship is not only peopled by officers and crew, is not only a physical structure of wood and bolts and ropes ...’

‘... it's also in the sea,’ says Giles, '‘ike other ships, subject to gusty winds and currents and weather patterns.’

‘I'm not only me, I'm in a world which includes my family and colleagues, clients like Joseph, you. When my mind observes me, it's not just looking at itself, at an enclosed system. It's also looking at a part of a much bigger whole. My world is connected to other worlds, and to the world. Things happen which have their source not in me, and yet they happen to me and have an effect on me. I have a dream about Hannibal. I meet Joseph. I have an experience of searching for something missing. I begin to write a thesis. I discover that the thing that is missing in Joseph is something that is missing in me too, that our worlds are joined, that there are connections, that the shared world shapes and excites and animates ... that it's a source ... These two perspectives ... the intrapsychic and the ... I can't think of a word for the other one ... it's more than the intersubjective, it feels more connected to ideas about the world being souled, about Gaia ... who was that philosopher, Giles, who said that we each of us have a soul but that the souls are contained within a larger circle which is the earth, which is in turn connected to God?’

‘This was Fechner, though similar ideas were very common amongst the romantic philosophers, ideas to do with anima mundi and unus mundus...'

‘Well I'm discovering for myself that this bigger perspective makes all the difference in the world! If I view myself as an isolated entity, as a body with an environmental history and a mind with adaptive capabilities, I've overcome an early environmental deficiency by developing a mind that can keep myself together, despite considerable internal pressure. End of story. I'm trapped but managing, just like Hannibal in his prison cell. It's only when viewed from the other perspective that the curious synchronicities have a meaning, that there's room for something else to happen. At the end of my Hannibal dream, the giant is hunched over the piano. There is more to this story... But Giles, perhaps this is too rosy for you, not grim enough!’

‘You suspect me of wallowing in life's limits, Steve, but that's not the case at all. By accepting them, by accepting embarrassing and awkward and messy realities which are limits - by not ignoring the limiting realities of trade winds, coastal currents, weather conditions - sailing can be a more pleasurable, less frustrating business, perhaps even one with more possibility. I'm the jolly pessimist, remember!’

‘And this meeting of the depressed optimist and the jolly pessimist seems to be edging me closer to something, Giles, which I want to try to articulate here. This agitation seems to be nudging me closer to some kind of articulated thesis. To a different story that feels coherent in some way, that brings all these chaotic feelings and experiences into some kind of relationship with each other ... I want to try to articulate this now ...’

‘Go on Steve. There's a momentum here. This is good.’

'OK ... so ... I'm letting myself feel this agitation, I'm letting my body be moved by all this agitated energy that come from my dreams and these childhood memories... and I'm sensing a connection between that agitation and my experience with Joseph, as if the agitation, the pacings around my house, are not just in my body, not just filling up my body so that I can't sit still, but are trying to move my thinking on too, somehow, trying to move it though some kind of restricting or claustrophobic space ...’

‘Like Hannibal's prison cell,’ says Giles.

‘Like Hannibal's prison cell, exactly. I'm wanting to say something, right now Giles, about what this is meaning to me ... as a therapist, I mean ... How my agitations and frustrations seem connected to an attempt by me to .... I don't know if this is going to make sense, Giles, but it feels like I'm attempting to change the story I'm living ... This is so difficult, at the moment ... it's like I'm trying to do two completely different things at the same time ... I'm deeply immersed in the subjective experience of articulating a new story, and at the same time I'm trying to take a step back and watch what I'm doing and say something coherent about this process ... Am I making any sense here Giles?’

‘Things are coming together Steve, I can hear it in your voice.’

‘That's good! ... OK ... So, right now I want to try to take a step backwards from all this agitation…’

‘... from the dreams and memories ...’

‘... from the personal stuff, this Steve process I'm immersed in ... I want to take a step back from that and think about it for a moment ...’

‘ ... you want to generalise from your personal experience ...’

‘... yes, I want to say some things about the story-telling that goes on inside therapy ...’

‘ ...this attempt to mate with the world that we've talked about…’

‘I think so, but I want to start somewhere different. I want to start with Winnicott, with what he says about the baby's experience.’

‘And you're returning to Winnicott right now because the generalisations he makes about the baby's experience resonate with how it must have been for you as a baby.’

‘That's exactly what I'm feeling,’ I say. ‘Winnicott says that at first there is no viable unit that can be described with the concept 'baby', that the baby is utterly helpless unless it's a part of a bigger unit, so that first there is the mother-baby, and it's only the mother's presence which stands between the baby and unthinkable anxiety …’

‘Without the mother, the baby would die.’

‘Yes, but with good-enough mothering, the baby gradually learns to act and speak and think.’

‘Thought, word and deed,’ says Giles. ‘And you're saying that ...’

'I don't know whether it's what I'm saying, or what we're saying Giles, or what Winnicott is saying... of whether it's what the process is saying ... but yes, what I want to say right at the moment is that each of these - thought, word and deed - has an ordering function.’

‘And by "ordering function" you mean ...?’

‘I mean that while at first it's the mother alone who stands between the baby and unthinkable anxiety by giving order to experience, soon... very soon ... in the first hours ... the baby"s own thoughts, words and deeds begin to have an ordering function ...’

‘The baby begins to experience an internal order…’

‘... which is not different from the order which researchers like Stern showed were created by the mother-baby interactions …’

‘… it's not unconnected, but increasingly it becomes differentiated…’

‘… so that gradually these three things begin to take the place of the mother as that which stands between the baby and unthinkable anxiety. If things go well, these three lead to an extension of the network of relationships that hold the infant.’

‘These thoughts, words and deeds are the stories that join the infant to a bigger world,’ says Giles.

‘They attempt to mate, to use the image we used some time ago,’ I say.

‘So they order and they connect,’ says Giles. ‘They are attempts at creation, they create the internal holding mother. They're also the means by which connections are made.’

‘I know none of this is original Giles, it's all been said before. The point is that now I am saying it! I'm feeling it! All these agitations and memories and thoughts and conversations with you and experiences with Joseph are somehow constellating in a way that's enabling me to say and feel these things myself.’

There's a silence between us for a while, one of our mulling silences it seems to me.

‘You're talking about these thoughts, words and deeds becoming a kind of mother-substitute,’ says Giles.

‘They become a kind of creation story ... this is what I feel, this is how I interact, this is how people respond to me, this is what I can do, this is the way I'm put together, this is me ...’

‘The thoughts, words and deeds of the mother, and the thoughts, words and deeds of the baby, act in the intersubjective field, the shared world, and a story is created,’ says Giles.

‘A pretty bloody complicated story, with lots of hidden bits! I'm not doing justice to it here!’

‘And this creation story,’ says Giles, ‘is created as much by the unspoken interactions - Zinkin's vitality affects - the music of the encounter ... as by the meaning of the words used.’

‘All of that,’ I say, ‘was a part of the making of the story of Steve, the one I've been talking about today ... my first story, my creation story if you like. The bounce in my mother's voice when I was being helpful, the tightness around her mouth when she looked at me jumping over the cushions ... Yes, this is also about the music ... the non-verbal undercurrent ... that goes with the content, which is as much a part of the story as the content ... So when I'm talking about 'story' here, or "story-telling', I'm wanting to include the rhythms and tonal range associated with thoughts, utterances and bodily gesture ... the way, in my own family, the story of holding mum's ankles in bed was told and responded to ... the seductions and distancings and excitements and dissemblings which were so much a part of my interactions with Joseph but were rarely actually talked about … I can't talk about story without talking about its implied music ... We're created not just by the articulated content of the stories we're told and which we tell ourselves and others, but by the rhythms, the music ... the form ... the nonverbal messages ... which convey much of the emotional meaning ... The sounds and gestures and bodily shiftings and facial sets and flickerings ... the pitch and rhythm of speech... the tonal range ... these are at least as important and vital ... and as potentially vitalising ...’

‘... or destructive and damaging and limiting ...’

‘Yes, that too... those things are at least as important as the content.’

‘It's these that hold the infant,’ says Giles, ‘in the way that Hesse's Rainmaker's ritual was able to hold the panicky villagers.’

‘That's right. And as you pointed out then, there's more to being in the world than being held. We're needing to move from being babies to being creators, shapers, doers. So the stories - our creation stories - have this function of holding us back from the brink, of giving our lives a sense of order and meaning, and they're also meant to help us be a part of the world, to be creators. But sometimes our creation stories don't work so well beyond holding us, they sometimes limit our capacity to join the world.’

‘Stories need to have the capacity to move us out into a world where our experiences are shareable and where lives are makeable,’ says Giles. ‘Stories attempt to bring us into relationship.’

‘I feel held by my creation story, it gives me a sense of who I am in the world, but increasingly I'm feeling limited by this story …’

‘You’re beginning to experience yourself in ways that don't fit this story.’

‘My creation story holds my sense of self, but other stories keep popping into my consciousness now ... the story of Hannibal, of the rage in the crowded front seat of the car, the story of my encounter with Joseph, the story of the encounter between the optimist and pessimist ... all these stories ... they're attempts to do more, to create a new story which incorporates more ... incorporates bits that were left out of the original story ...’

‘You keep being brought back to this abiding interest of yours, which is to do with the nature of stories, the nature of storytelling'.’

‘Stories have these different aspects, these different functions. They hold and they reach out. They express what we've experienced but they don't stand still! Something enters the picture - soul or anima as Jung would say - and suddenly we become conscious of what's missing. We start to have dreams or experiences that are reminders of what is denied to us. We start to feel frustration or agitation or desire, we try to find a way of expressing these things ... A new story starts to form itself... Stories have the potential, then, to bring us into a deeper relationship with the world.’

‘And they have the capacity to keep us in our prison cells,’ says Giles.

‘So maybe there are healthy stories and unhealthy stories, embodied ones and disembodied ones.’

‘But we're starting to think in terms of stories as nouns again. It seems more freeing to think of what the stories are doing, or attempting to do.’

‘In health our stories connect us to life, to the life we have and the life we do not have but are reaching out towards. In mental illness our stories have become split off and disconnect us from life.’

‘The creation story of Steve that you've described here seems to have both these elements in it. Joseph's story too. They're attempting to mate and at the same time they're attempting to resist the attempt.’

‘And surely that's true of all stories, isn't it? Stories have elements of health and illness. We are all of us inhabited by internal characters at different points along the continuum between health and illness. Even in the most disembodied story there's a part that's trying to reach out, to mate.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Giles.

I can hear the note of reservation in his voice, but at the moment there's more I want to get out.

‘I want to say something about what happens when a disembodied story is told to someone else. Telling this story to another is an attempt to create something new, which is always a relationship. The hope is that the relationship will heal something, that it will lead to a new story?’

‘That something new will be created,’ says Giles. ‘That a new creation story is made.’

‘Yes. And the creation is therapeutic. The stories have a therapeutic effect on both teller and listener. The telling of the stories to each other creates a new story. The creation of this new story has a greater therapeutic potential than the telling of the personal stories.’

‘So we're not trying to get at the truth, we're not trying to dig down to some solid bedrock of fact which will release the illness, as Freud might have suggested,’ says Giles.

‘No,’ I say. ‘All stories are fictions ... that is, imperfect attempts to express our dynamic experience.’

‘Yes,’ says Giles, ‘the expression must resonate what has been experienced. Isn't this perhaps what you mean by embodied. That it has as its source a body?’

‘And it's always an imperfect relationship, isn't it,’ I say. ‘There's always a tension... there's a tension between what is experienced and its expression.’

‘Sometimes the gap between them, the tension, is big and sometimes not so big,’ says Giles.

‘It seems to be less in dreams and hallucinations and spontaneous free associations, slips and play,’ I say, ‘and that includes the telling of deliberately fictional stories, than it is in more consciously told stories... in anecdotes, in the stories we tell about our real lives, which have been more deliberately constructed by the mind.’

‘So the therapist,’ says Giles ‘is continually matching, relating, letting these various stories rub up against each other, noting the tensions and the points of connection, worrying away at the gaps.’

‘And a therapist's stories ... his matchings, relating and so forth... are therapeutic if they are convincing.’

‘If they seem to express a possible or ordering meaning which resonates ...’ says Giles.

‘Which is different from the question of whether they are the truth or not, whether they are right. It is sometimes more to do with whether they work musically for the client, whether they are in harmony with the client's internal aesthetics, whether they reverberate, whether they excite something ... provoke some bodily response ...’

‘Whether they hit the mark ... or, if we're sticking to a more musical image, if they strike a chord ...’

‘These chords set up reverberations... and the bouncing back and forth of these reverberations creates new chords, a new story, which can be therapeutic ... I think this was happening very imperfectly between Joseph and me ... where my chords and the chords we made together were touching one part of him but leaving other parts untouched.’

For a moment Giles says nothing and I'm wondering if he's disagreeing with this. But when he speaks it's clear that he's been mulling over an earlier part of our conversation.

‘I'm wanting to go back a bit Steve, just for a moment if I may. We were talking about the teleological view that stories have a goal, and if we confine this to a relational goal, to an urge to connect with other people without which life would not be possible, then I can go along with that. But stories don't just seek to connect, you're saying. They have a defensive function as well.’

‘A disembodied story can insulate us from vital life processes,’ I say. ‘This is what's so palpable from what I was saying earlier about the kinds of stories that Joseph and I find ourselves telling, in our own lives and in our failed time together.’

‘And you are also implying, aren't you Steve, that the opposite is also true, that a disembodied story can connect us to vital life processes, to a psychotic core which is alive and dangerous and energetically straining to break out of its disembodied state and enter the lived life from which it has been expelled.’

‘Yes, that's what I'm wanting to say, that the continual breakdown of my mind's attempt to structure experience keeps me in touch with an animating psychotic dimension. My agitations and fallings-apart are therapeutically useful, for myself and for my clients.’

‘They have the potential to be useful,’ says Giles.

‘Yes they're not necessarily useful, you're right,’ I say. ‘I mustn't let myself forget how my time with Joseph ended. We failed, in some essential way. But the disembodied story does hold some clues, or point to a direction ...this is my quarrel with Winnicott when he calls fantasying useless, not worth our attention.’ (2)

‘For you Steve, these disembodied fantasies have a connection to something important,’ says Giles.

‘They're connected to the one story. There's only one basic story and all the others, embodied and disembodied, are variations on the one story. Even if a disembodied story has lost its connection to what we call everyday reality, it is still connected to the one story.’

‘This is a surprisingly monotheistic idea,’ says Giles, ‘from one who talks about complexity, the necessity of many perspectives, the plethora of internal characters!’

‘Is it?’ I say. ‘I’m not so sure. There's the story of all the different sailing ships on the sea, each with their own internal dramas - leaks, mutinies, diseases, encounters with pirates and so on. But there's also the single story of which they're all a part, the story of the sea.’

‘Yes but why the insistence on the single story? Why is that important?’

‘I suppose because I can't explain the synchronicities that have happened in this work with Joseph, and in particular the coming together of two worlds, the throwing together of two people with such similar issues, without insisting that everything is connected, without keeping hold of the idea that all our stories are reflections of the one story.’

‘It's an idea that makes sense of your experience,’ says Giles.

‘That's right. And it helps me make sense of the conviction that I have that my Hannibal dream, even though it's all about being cut off from the world, is important, that it's connected to something vital, that I've been right to turn my attention to it. This Hannibal dream, and all the ones I've had since which have felt like developments and variations of it, has exposed an underlying organising story that I've been both living out and denying ... and I'm trying to tell a story about that story... to you, and in this thesis ... in order to shift something ... or maybe it's also to document a shift, though the writing of the thesis feels too active a process to be described like that ... Anyway ... I've developed in my life a way of being that is now causing too much pain and I'm trying to find a way through it ... So my feelings of rage and agitation and impotence and humiliation ... they're doing a couple of things, aren't they? ... they're my frustrated response to imprisonment and they're also an attempt to reconnect to a primitive aliveness ... And this helps me to understand my feelings of being useless, of being unconnected! ... These are a kind of unstructuring, a breakdown of a mental organisation of experience which has limited my relational and emotional life ... so I then experience the world as unheld, complex, chaotic ... which is untenable for long, it just leads to greater impotence... so then I get impelled to search for a new way of making sense of things ... I feel constrained by perspectives which are intrapsychic or even intersubjective ... I find myself full of an agitated compulsion to write, to read, to talk to you ... I feel these things as bodily agitations looking for some kind of satisfaction or resolution ... that's why this continual use of the sexual metaphor, of the urge to attempt to mate, is so appropriate here ... by following the urgings and agitations, and writing and reading and talking like this, all these ideas find their way to the surface …’

‘There's the urge to seek sexual release,’ says Giles. ‘To ejaculate.’

‘So that's why, for me Giles, these disembodied stories - the stories that come out of my present somewhat disembodied existence - have a connection to something vital.’

‘They contain a primitive, fundamental and raw energy,’ says Giles.

‘Yes, they may be cut off from reality, but they're still energetic,’ I say.

‘Even a wank is energetic and remains connected to our sexuality,’ says Giles.

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘A wank is connected to the one story, even when it acts as a substitute for the real thing, for sex with someone else. A wank and the fantasies that accompany it are connected to the main plot. That's why I can't be as dismissive as Winnicott about what he calls fantasying.’

‘Though surely Winnicott is right,’ says Giles, ‘when he says that the fantasying can prevent an engagement with life. A wank can be a substitute for the business of finding a partner, of living a life.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘And this applies to the therapist as well as the client. A therapist's own potency can be contained in, confined to, a disembodied story. If a therapist is unaware that his own stories are disembodied, then he'll be stuck in the role of impotent observer, unable to take an active part in the creation of something new. Disembodied stories, stories that have become split off from the body of the therapist and the body of the world, get unhooked from relational energies and prevent a vital relationship with the client.’

‘They, too, can become a wank,’ says Giles.

‘This thesis is a potential wank,’ I say. ‘I'm trying to find a partner - you, Joseph, a psychoanalytic tradition, a philosophic tradition - to connect myself up with. I'm trying to find a body to put my semen into, or one where there'll be an exchange of bodily fluids. But there are times when I feel like the boy in my dream, the one I began with, spilling things (maybe what he was spilling was his semen!) all over the study floor.’

Giles has been giving talk here in Canberra and I'm in the car now driving him back to his hotel at the end of the day. We drive for a while in silence, my mind going back to something he had said in his lecture.

The history of ideas is a part of our existence. The study of this stuff is adventurous, challenging, and we all take part in this adventure unconsciously. The goal of thinking is not knowledge or self-awareness so much as living: we think in order to live life more fully, which usually means that we think in order to manage pain and difficult problems. ‘Without trauma,’ said Winnicott, ‘there is nothing worth knowing.’ ‘To understand a philosophers work,' said Iris Murdoch, 'you must know what they're afraid of.’ Ideas come out of actual experience, out of struggling with the problems of living, out of our emotional embodied minds, if you like; ideas and events, therefore, are inseparable. Thinking is a part of our nature; thoughts emerge naturally (though not without pain or effort) out of the lives we are living.

‘Giles, are you needing to switch off, or can I ask you something about today's workshop,’ I say.

‘No, that's fine, go ahead.’

‘When you were talking about the nature of ideas this morning, you were linking them with events.’

‘It's more than linking. I think Steve ... I'm wanting to suggest that they're inseparable.’

‘This is actually quite difficult for my Cartesian mind to grasp, Giles. Inseparable? Can't I think something without it coming directly out of an event? Can't I have a train of thought that goes along on its merry way without being embodied in the kinds of ways we've been talking about over the last year or so?’

‘I don't know Steve ... Probably ... But if it's possible, and I'm not sure that it is actually ... but if it's possible, then these kinds of thoughts aren't very interesting, are they? ... they don't seem to have much to do with anything.’

‘So you're saying that ideas are an aspect of an event.’

‘Thoughts come out of brains in bodies,’ says Giles. ‘It's the relationship between the body (and its events) and the thought that interests me. You heard me talking about Spinoza this morning.’

‘I heard it Giles but I want to hear a lot more. His language, his terminology, doesn't mean a lot to me, all his talk about substance and attributes and modes. I haven't read anything of his, or much about him. It seems so formidable.’

‘You'll like Spinoza, Steve, I'm sure you will. He's talking about the very things you keep coming back to.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning all your wondering about aspects and essences, about whether you think about things in the right way, whether you're being effective or not, about feeling useless and wanting to be more active ... Spinoza has things to say about all of this, good things Steve.’

‘Go on Giles, I'm all ears. What's he saying about these things?’

‘This is a very large subject, not easily entered. Some of his language is formidable, so unlike Hillman's for example. But let me try. Let's see where we get to.’

By now we've reached Giles's hotel and I've switched off the engine, but neither of us makes a move to get out of the car.

‘You've said to me before that you have this sense, Steve, that to think about an individual is too limiting ... and at the same time that when you start to think more globally, more philosophically if you like, your ideas tend to float upwards and out of fruitful contact with your experienced world.’

‘I end up feeling limited and useless,’ I say. ‘Cut-off. Like I'm living in this psychic chamber with my thoughts bouncing off the walls and never reaching the outside.’

‘Or like Hannibal in his prison, wanting to play but for some reason unable.’

‘So what's Spinoza saying to me about all of this?’

‘Be patient here Steve. There's no one idea that Spinoza has that speaks directly to all this, it's not like that at all. Spinoza has constructed this extraordinary body of interlocking ideas, and it's not the effect of any particular idea so much as the effect of the whole edifice that I think you're going to find useful... Spinoza looks at things globally, but also minutely ... He talks about the nature of the world on the one hand, and he talks about the relationship of our thoughts to our bodies on the other.’

‘So does he also say that to think in terms of an individual is too limiting?’

‘Spinoza says that there is only one real thing, only one substance, that the "beings' we experience as separate - people, animals, trees, rocks, clouds, rivers - are modes of this one substance ...’

‘Mode? Meaning that all these things are the forms in which we experience God.’

‘Something like that,’ says Giles. ‘God is all there is, and therefore nature is another word for God. He talks about 'nature naturing', that's what happens, that's all that happens... And he says that this substance, God ... or nature ... has an infinite number of attributes, but that our human capacities are such that we know only two of these …’

‘Attributes? Is this different from modes?’

‘I'm using Spinoza's terminology here Steve, but he uses these words in very specific ways. Let's see ... God or Nature is the only substance and this one substance is continually expressing itself through its modes ... This I think is what Goethe was writing about in that passage called 'Nature' which you've used at the beginning of this thesis, Goethe was much influenced by Spinoza ... Spinoza sets out to prove that God must have an infinite number of attributes, by which he means there are an infinite number of ways that the essence of God might be perceived. ‘An attribute I understand to be that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance.’ Spinoza says that each of these attributes can only be conceived through itself.’

‘Is he saying here that there are an infinite number of ways of seeing the complexity of this one substance, this single reality?’

‘Not in the way that you mean Steve, not in the way you've been writing about in the thesis. He's actually addressing Descartes’ assertion that there are two substances, mind and body (or to use Descartes' words, thought and extension). There is only one substance, says Spinoza, a substance with an infinite number of attributes each of which can only be conceived through itself, but that as humans we are limited to experiencing only two of these, the attribute of thought (which we can conceive only through the attribute of thought) and the attribute of extension (which we can conceive only through the attribute of extension)’

‘I'm in danger of getting very lost here Giles. So an attribute is what you see as being the essence when looked at in a certain way? Is that what he's saying? Like if you look at a tree in a forest valley from a mountain top its essence seems to be something to do with the canopy and its relationship to the whole forest, and if you look at it from the forest floor you're much more. aware of its individuality, its rootedness, its age, the fact that it's a home for birds? Is this about looking at something from different perspectives and consequently experiencing it as having different attributes? Is this another version of Nietzsche's multi-perspectivism?’

‘Yes and no Steve. He is talking about different ways of perceiving but not in the spatial way that your example gives. This is more to do with the human capacity to experience the essence of a thing in two different ways, through thought and through bodies. He says somewhere in the Ethics, "We neither feel nor perceive any individual things save bodies and modes of thinking." These are the attributes of God that we're capable of conceiving, and we conceive each through itself, bodies through our bodies and thoughts through our thoughts.’

‘I’m struggling, Giles, this is all so unfamiliar. Can you connect it up to specific things we've been talking about in our supervision sessions?’

‘Think about the last few months with Joseph Steve. Spinoza would say that there are two ways you've experienced this slice of life, this bit of nature naturing. There's the experience through the attribute of thought, where you got excited by his story and decided to use it in your Jung Society talk and then you felt useless despite reading Hillman and you wondered if there were other ways of approaching this work and at the same time you were feeling depressed and angry and worried about aspects of your personal life and you had some ideas about all of this while you were down at the coast ... that, if you like, is how you perceived one attribute, the attribute of thought, through itself. And you've also experienced this, perceived this, in bodily terms (and straight away you'll see that we're not talking about two different things here, but about two attributes of the one substance, two ways of conceiving the one thing): a body called Joseph bumped into a body called Steve and there were some impressions made in both bodies and one effect of this collision was that the Steve-body bumped up against the Giles-body, and so on.’

‘A bit like billiard ball on a table, that's what it sounds like,’ I say.

‘Well Spinoza talks a lot about motion and rest, he's got a Seventeenth Century view of the mechanical world that informs the way he writes about some of this stuff... perhaps all of this is of limited interest in itself except that it does something about the way we experience bodies and minds.’

‘So what does it do, Giles? I'm still not seeing how any of this makes a difference.’

‘Spinoza is someone who keeps reminding us of the reality of matter, about the reality of bodies, about the fact that we're each born into a particular place, into a particular family, with a particular body and a particular brain.’

‘And is he saying that out of these material realities comes desires and pains, particular emotions which we attempt to manage through our meaning making?’

‘As long as you're not implying something like because of x (bodies), therefore y (thoughts). Spinoza insists that these are two attributes of the one substance, that the body doesn't lead to thoughts, that thoughts don't control the body, but that these are two different ways of experiencing the one predetermined natural process, the one expression of the essence of God-in-action.' (5)

‘So if I try to translate all of this into the kind of language I've been using in the thesis, Giles, I'd say that the stories we tell are living aspects of the material lives we experience, that they're a part of the process of living and absolutely no different in kind from other bodily functions such as breathing …’

‘... we cry, we breathe, we sweat, we eat, we shit, we fuck, we speak, we touch, we tremble, we die ...’

‘... all of these things can be viewed through the attribute of thinking,’ I say, ‘and all of these things can be viewed through the attribute of extension, but through whichever, they're still a part of the one thing happening, which is nature naturing.’

‘Thinking,’ says Giles, ‘is not a split off disembodied thing, as Descartes would have it.’

‘And this is why the images of the psyche are so real for you, isn't it Giles. You see them bodily, like farts, whereas I tend to see them as ornaments, creations, clever manipulations or constructions.’

‘Surely you're exaggerating! Surely you're making a parody of yourself here! But Steve we were talking a minute ago about bodies bumping into each other. Spinoza is a body that's worth bumping into.’

‘You like bumping into the Spinoza body and you think I'll like it too?’

‘To read Spinoza is to feel in touch with the way things necessarily are.’

‘I felt the same when I read Hillman's Dream and the Underworld. I felt exhilarated.’

‘You did, I remember.’

‘But my excitement took me to a lonely cut-off place where I felt useless..

‘Spinoza is a useful philosopher,’ says Giles. ‘Bumping into him results in a greater engagement. That's the effect on me, anyway.’

Endnotes

(1) p 82 Rhode (1994)

(2) This quarrel is taken up below in Chapter 11.

(3) p 1 'By MODE (modus) I understand the Modifications (affectiones) of a substance or that which is in something else through which is may be conceived.' Definition V, Spinoza (1910 edition)

(4) p 1 Spinoza (1910) Definition IV,

(5) p 38 Spinoza (1910) Second Part Axiom IV

(6) Spinoza says [p 89 Spinoza (1910)] in the Second Part of his Ethics 'Concerning the nature and origin of the mind':

... the decision of the mind and the desire and determination of the body are simultaneous in nature, or rather one and the same thing, which when considered under the attribute of thought and explained through the same we call decision (decretum), and when considered under the attribute of extension and deduced from the laws of motion and rest we call determination (determinatio) ...